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But Why
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@shit-piss-love I just think it’s weird that in 2023 we’re having some kind of odd debate about what kind of characters is ‘okay’ to portray yourselves as and to do otherwise implies there’s something wrong with you as a player. As if you’re not altruistic enough as a human because you happen to enjoy medieval fantasy tropes, even if, yes, the historical aspect can, and probably should, be side-stepped. Since it seems to me that most rational people would agree from a historical standpoint, yeah, that’s pretty bad.
But really, point to any point in the length of human history and show me something that wasn’t horrible that was caused by humans. And I’m sure as hell not going to go deeper than surface level in noting just how bad humanity is from a larger scope. That’s not the point. The argument to me feels more like moralistic grandstanding than anything else.
It’s…it’s really not that deep.
I don't know what I'm doing. Poke at Seven Nations sevennations.aresmush.com port 2021
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@Testament said in But Why:
The argument to me feels more like moralistic grandstanding than anything else.
Yeah that’s where I land. Like I have my personal prefs of what I want to play and in what genres. Others have theirs. “You are bad for wanting to play this type of character and/or in this genre” is just bargain basement self-aggrandizement.
I’m actually gonna go a step further here in disagreeing with the OP. I also think it is Absolutely Fine and Good to play an evil, serf-oppressing, conflict-profiting, violence-dispensing, privileged aristocrat who is actively engaging in Bad Things. The assertion that it is only morally defensible to play Good Folk Doing Good Stuff is puerile and trite. Engaging with such a role is no different from reading through Antony Beevor’s Fall of Berlin.
This hobby allows for a lot more than simply playing heroic characters. Playing an unheroic character can be a vehicle for exploration of the human experience, and can be equally valid whether or not that character goes through a redemption arc. Our world is complex and built on circumstance and context; it can be interesting to explore ideas like “why good people do bad things” or “what drives someone to rationalize acts of evil” or even simply “what is the internal experience of someone who is put in a position with few options that don’t hurt someone”.
Even more simply, narratives are built on Conflict. Villains (and I am using broad terminology to describe what is a very wide spectrum even before contextualization) serve narratives by prompting Conflict. Heroes with no Conflict just sit around and have tea parties (obligatory: playing TeaMU is a morally defensible activity even if i personally find it boring af).
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@shit-piss-love said in But Why:
@Testament said in But Why:
The argument to me feels more like moralistic grandstanding than anything else.
I’m actually gonna go a step further here in disagreeing with the OP. I also think it is Absolutely Fine and Good to play an evil, serf-oppressing, conflict-profiting, violence-dispensing, privileged aristocrat who is actively engaging in Bad Things. The assertion that it is only morally defensible to play Good Folk Doing Good Stuff is puerile and trite. Engaging with such a role is no different from reading through Antony Beevor’s Fall of Berlin.I think, in a way, it’s important to have people play villainous characters to allow people to play heroic characters. I gotta say that since I came back to MUSHing I have gotten so weary of social RP with no consequences or conflict. I feel like a lot of what I do is just sit around talking to people about their lives even in fantastical settings. There are some exceptions, but it has seemed rare to me (and my times are pretty shit right now, so that’s likely a factor). Looking back at old logs, there was still a decent amount of the social stuff, but there were also a lot of plots with combat or sneaking into things, or where power plays and factions tried to vie for authority over another group. I also have a tendency to play the “fighter” archetype, so maybe I’m just frustrated with not being able to engage in that part of the Power Fantasy (hence playing a scholar on Concordia, I don’t have to consider that aspect).
Maybe this isn’t all because of villainous PCs, but there were a good chunk of IC player conflicts that spilled into the larger playerbase that show up in some logs and that I recall. On Star Wars games, I remember a lot of IC strife and conflict created between the Imperial/Sith and Alliance/NR/Jedi players because of diametrically opposed factions. Some of this was deeply annoying – every WoD game in the late 00s-early 10s had to have the Changelings split into two freeholds – but it still generated new stories that weren’t just TeaMU*.
tl;dr: villains villain so heroes can be heroic and vice-versa.
they/them
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@shit-piss-love said in But Why:
edit: idk where the line is here can the whole site just be R&R please
I mean, 100% to everything else you said and I know this comment was probably supposed to be purely facetious but still
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@shit-piss-love said in But Why:
edit: idk where the line is here can the whole site just be R&R please
I mean, 100% to everything else you said and I know this comment was probably supposed to be purely facetious but still
Yeah mostly I was just trying to throw some salt and pepper on my last sentence in the paragraph to maybe avoid a rules infraction.
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@somasatori said in But Why:
I think, in a way, it’s important to have people play villainous characters to allow people to play heroic characters.
Hi it’s me I’m the person who plays exclusively non-heroic or outright villainous characters. For me personally I think it is that in my 30+ years of RPing I’ve GM’d 90%, and so my default mode of operation in RP is to try to be some kind of motive force that gives others players something interesting to work with. That can be outright villainous but it can also mean being an iconoclast in a world of true believers, and lower class character (with class consciousness) in a high class world, or a criminal in a world of rules followers.
Tangentially, this preference is also what has turned me off MU* over time. This could be a whole other thread but going against the grain (ie. from my perspective, providing the Conflict that makes narratives interesting) has a high chance of provoking an equal OOC reaction that gets you gatekept.
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@shit-piss-love I have basically the same history as you do, it sounds like. Mostly GM, mostly villain to antiheroic at best. The one character I did play who was truly heroic (a Summer Court Changeling) became so obsessed with his ideals that he fell from grace and became antiheroic. Speaking of ooc bleed, in that case I was able to use the ooc to extract the character from being connected to VASpider, so at least it worked out in that case. I played a lot of WoD, and personally opinion, I don’t think anyone is heroic in that setting regardless of their intention.
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@shit-piss-love said in But Why:
Tangentially, this preference is also what has turned me off MU* over time. This could be a whole other thread but going against the grain (ie. from my perspective, providing the Conflict that makes narratives interesting) has a high chance of provoking an equal OOC reaction that gets you gatekept.
I’m not sure if it’s an OOC reaction exactly. I mean, it is, but not in the way you might think. A lot of people RP to get away from RL for a while. Having that bitchy boss or unpleasant customer right there in your fun pretendy times when you’re trying to GET AWAY from just those sorts of people will naturally lead people to avoid such a character. Particularly if you play an iconoclast and not an outright villain, this sense of exasperation can be pretty demoralizing.
It’s not that they don’t like you, they just hate dealing with your character.
There’s not much to do in this case other than make your intentions clear, just like when a scene involves something more heavy like torture. Just say outright: “My character is a hateful, bitter powergobbler who only feels good when making someone else miserable. Is it okay to have a scene of X?”
Alternatively, you can have a character who is both a villain and really likable. It’s hard to do, but when it works it’s great. Londo Mollari from Babylon 5 is a good example (which has been played to great success on MU*s).
… Man, I would kill for a good Babylon 5 MU*.
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@STD My experience was more that if you are playing a character whose goals run at odds with the norm, and you’re trying to do it in a way that respects the consent of others, your situation is that you will succeed at nothing unless those others consent to lose. And that happens so infrequently as to be essentially never. You can be an antihero/villain/difficult person that other people really like to play with but that doesn’t translate into success of your goals. The prevailing group play style in MU* is “we’re all here to collaboratively beat the bad thing” and any kind of rock in the shoe, no matter how fun to RP with, is going to get iced out of actual impact.
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My experience with most “I’m the Villian” people (but certainly not all) was that they tended to be ready to accuse people oocly of being not as great/hardcore a RPer at them, not wanting good stories, ect when rolls or RP didn’t go their way. Just like a lot of people who aren’t villains, but there was a lot more just…personal attacks. Or huge rants concurrent with a tense scene, ect. Things that just made it exceptionally unpleasant to deal with. Part of this may be because on most of the places I played you could not use +rolls to force another PC into certain actions. (Social dice were PvE, not PVP). Because the players that were highly dependent on (and were allowed to purchase with no check in by staff, despite the fact it was OBVIOUS what the player wanted to do with the PC) that not being the case, they were understandably frustrated that they’d invested all this shit into things they couldn’t force on other players at their will. But they’d usually take it out on the other players in the scene.
Or, they were primarily interested in disrupting huge things, not so much doing a lot of small things or building up stories with others. The person who cannot be bothered to accept any small group or one on one invites or whatever, but will show up to every business scene and then get very very upset when they can’t blow it up. The person who never orchestrates a scene that anyone can come to, but damn if they don’t come to every event they disdain to disrupt it because they don’t like “boring” stuff like that anyway and if people weren’t so pretty princess unlike the RP badass they are then it wouldn’t be a big deal.
It’s just obnoxious. And boring. And very, very, very common.
But, I have seen quite a few people do it well. Betrayals that were amazing once they unfolded. People who built tension into everything they did, including small stuff. People who were polite about disrupting other player events, and became collaborators at others to really spice things up in a way that was fun for everyone but the people who need to win all the time (which honestly comes from all different sorts of players).
I think it’s hard engage with people you hold disdain for. That’s the problem with a lot of people that I’ve seen be highly unsuccessful with villain characters. They don’t hide their disdain for anything but their own RP very well. But it also very much depends on the game, because it is also the case that there are some games where that kind of “i want to be in conflict with other PCs as my source of enjoyment” just…won’t work for a variety of reasons.
However the people who are stellar RPers I cherish. Most of my go to folks make complex and not dudley do right PCs. I met someone on a feudal type place who betrayed pretty much all the other PCs after doing months of work to be in a position to do so. They almost got caught a few times, but did not. When they finally set their plain in motion my PC was really affected, and at a stroke I lost months of RL work that she’d been doing too, but it was an amazing experience ESPECIALLY once they succeeded and then you could look back at all the times that things could have gone differently, and also admire their ooc discipline too for not waivering and also not giving anything away OOC either. It changed the scope and course of that game! And I know there were definintely people mad about it, but that’s going to happen no matter what. Staff can make room for stuff like that to happen. I think more should.
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@mietze I’d like to think I am one of the latter people you describe but who knows. Like I said I care about consent, and I don’t go around looking to clobber scenes and steal the spotlight, I’m not looking for special treatment and I see RP as a collective activity. I just like to take a position a few degrees off of the norm but still within theme and have enough rough edges or diverging opinions or whatnot that I can make something that I find interesting happen. I have a lot of thoughts on the topic but it’s quite a tangent from the thread.
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As someone who enjoys a good bit of IC conflict (and who also gets a bit queasy at the idea of perfectly charitable, kind nobles who wouldn’t hurt a fly and yet live an idle life off the work of their peasants), I’m another one who tends to play outside the usual box.
I try to make it very obvious that my characters are generally going to upset social norms and cause pearl-clutching for one reason or another, but I also try to stay within consent and within the themes of the game I’m on. Sometimes it’s obvious, sometimes it’s less so, but I enjoy making people think and sparking reactions that aren’t ‘how lovely, more tea?’
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@shit-piss-love said in But Why:
@STD My experience was more that if you are playing a character whose goals run at odds with the norm, and you’re trying to do it in a way that respects the consent of others, your situation is that you will succeed at nothing unless those others consent to lose.
My take is that in a setting/theme where there’s a clear-ish line between villains and heroes, choosing to take a villain role means you consent to lose. The aggrievating bit for me hasn’t been losing but having ex machina stuff keep my long-simmering thoughtful villainous schemes to a low challenge-rating so heroes could thoughtlessly foil them between tea-parties. And that’s actually something I feel like a villain’s player consents to, just not every time.
More relevant to the thread is the disturbing experience of playing a nuanced villain and finding the heroes are all just as horrible, but the narrative never acknowledges it.
My experience with most “I’m the Villian” people (but certainly not all) was that they tended to be ready to accuse people oocly of being not as great/hardcore a RPer at them, not wanting good stories, ect when rolls or RP didn’t go their way. Just like a lot of people who aren’t villains, but there was a lot more just…personal attacks.
I associate that with the themes where everybody’s morally ambiguous at best, and players who don’t identify their PC as a villain, but want to play a ‘dark hero’ and are all cheesed off that people aren’t playing along with a fantasy of being both intimidating and admired.
